How to Live With a Phantom

To begin understanding Shintaro Sakamoto, it helps to start with Todd Rundgren. Sakamoto started his career with a psych-pop garage band before decamping into the studio to make the Platonic ideal of pop music by himself.

To begin understanding Shintaro Sakamoto, it helps to start with Todd Rundgren. Like Rundgren, Sakamoto started his career with a psych-pop garage band before decamping into the studio and striving toward making the Platonic ideal of pop music by himself. The trajectory is the same, though while Rundgren only lasted about 2 years with the Nazz before releasing a string of idiosyncratic hermit-pop LPs through the 1970s, Sakamoto led the great Yura Yura Teikoku (Japanese for "The Wobbling Empire") from 1989 through 2010 before releasing his solo debut this year. Like so many Japanese acts of the past few decades, Yura was huge in its home country, but only registered a cult-act blip stateside (though DFA quietly re-issued an LP on its Death from Abroad imprint in 2009). The impeccably produced lounge-pop of How to Live With a Phantom seems destined for a small-but-ardent listenership.

Sakamoto produced and played many of the instruments on Phantom, conjuring the image of Rundgren-as-golden god secluded in his hotel room of theSomething/Anything gatefold photo. But while it's easy to imagine Sakamoto laying down conga tracks while adjusting board levels with his big toe, Phantom's vibe more closely evokes the anonymous band downstairs in the hotel lounge, playing for weary business travelers and soundtracking the early moments of an ill-fated hookup. He sounds less like a passionate frontman, in other words, and more like some sort of Japanese Bryan Ferry, with songs suggesting the pop formalism of Rundgren and Steely Dan--and occasionally Juan Garcia Esquivel's Space-Age Bachelor Pad--sung in Japanese, with a glassy, purposeful distance between musician and listener.

Dig deeper, though, and you start to hear the echoes of past pop moments when localized groups of musicians started incorporating influences on a global scale: the late 1960s Tropicalia moment in Brazil, and especially the mid-1990s Shibuya-Kei movement in Sakamoto's hometown of Tokyo. This is the quiet genius of Phantom: it incorporates so much, yet remains as willfully aloof as the mannequin Sakamoto poses with on the cover (or, if you like, his pose in the center of this older Yura Yura promo photo).

Aloof, sure, but far from sanitized. Granted, many readers likely see this distinction as a choice between Plain and Diet Plain, but if you've come this far, you know it amounts to much more than the narcisissm of minor differences. Phantom not only feels self-aware, but for something that sounds like it was it was recorded in the "Rockit" house, it's got a sense of humor as well.

Me, I was hooked when the "Shakedown Street" guitar showed up in "Mask on Mask," and my affection was only further solidified via that song's conga run, Sakamoto's lovely melodic bass leads, and-- wait for it-- his squealing sax solo. About the time of the second flute break in "Dancing With Pain", or maybe when the aquarium air pump sound effect kicked in during "A Stick and Slacks", or perhaps it my fifth run through the opening track's Getz/Gilberto nod, it became clear that the album's purposeful artificiality is much more in line with Beck than say, S1m0ne. Maybe this is Shintaro's way of honing a new skill: playing with phantoms without tipping over into the uncanny valley.